Karma reasons for concrete message

Message

Your being duped. There is none. People are duping you into such thinking by talking about "water" here or there. Its a scam to get more funding.

Welcome to the forum, SW.

I agree: we have yet to find direct evidence of extraterrestrial life. But we've barely begun to look. And it isn't being "duped" to recognize that the conditions and key elements of life as we know it aren't unique to Earth. Even in our own solar system, liquid water definitely exists on the larger moons of Jupiter and Saturn, for instance.

Among the hypotheses of how and where life started on Earth (abiogenesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Deep_sea_vent_hypothesis is the "deep sea vent theory". The compositions of Europa (Jupiter) and Enceladus (Saturn) include trace metals, silicates and carbon compounds that life-as-we-know-it uses. So at least some of the conditions that may have originated all life on our own planet can be found elsewhere in our own backyard, astronomically speaking.

Quote

We can't even create life here. How could it happen by natural causes elsewhere?

Also true. We haven't created wholly artificial life. Yet. Abiogenesis is a very new field in biology / chemistry. Some important stepping-stones to actually making life from non-living elements have been accomplished, however. These include the creation of an artificial bacterium genome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_life). From the relevant section:

Quote

In May 2010, Craig Venter's group announced they had been able to assemble a complete genome of millions of base pairs, insert it into a cell, and cause that cell to start replicating.[26] For the creation of this "synthetic" cell, first the complete DNA sequence of the genome of a bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides was determined. A new genome was then designed based on this genome with watermarks and elements necessary for growth in yeast and genome transplantation added, as well as part of its sequence deliberately deleted. This new genome was synthesized in small fragments—over a thousand overlapping cassettes of synthetic oligonucleotides were created—which were then assembled in steps in yeast and other cells, and the complete genome finally transplanted into cell from another species Mycoplasma capricolum from which all genetic material had been removed.[27][28] The cell divided and was "entirely controlled by (the) new genome".[28] This cell has been referred to by Venter as the "first synthetic cell", and was created at a cost of over $40 million dollars.[28]

There is some debate within the scientific community over whether this cell can be considered completely synthetic on the grounds that:[28] the chemically synthesized genome was an almost 1:1 copy of a naturally occurring genome and, the recipient cell was a naturally occurring bacterium. The Craig Venter Institute maintains the term "synthetic bacterial cell" but they also clarify "...we do not consider this to be "creating life from scratch" but rather we are creating new life out of already existing life using synthetic DNA."

Life is chemistry, enormously but not insurmountably subtle. Given the immense size and age of the universe, and that the conditions that produced our life-bearing world are not unique, it's a reasonable hypothesis that life exists elsewhere.